Alex Palmer seeks equity partner for West End Summit office project

Rubenstein Partners no longer involved, but developer Palmer said he has new hotel and residential partners

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The West End Summit property, seen from the corner of 16th Avenue North and Hayes Street, included a massive hole in the ground after work was halted on an underground parking garage.(Photo: File / The Tennessean)Buy Photo

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Philadelphia-based investor Rubenstein Partners confirmed that it's no longer involved with the West End Summit project.

For more than a decade, developer Alex Palmer has sought to develop the 3.9 acres at the Broadway/West End split.

The project that Palmer now plans is expected to include 325 residential units and a four-star, 250-room hotel.

There's also a 360,000-square-foot office building and a parking garage, which are expected cost roughly $160 million to build.

Developer Alex Palmer has retained a real estate investment banking firm to help with securing an equity partner for an office building planned on his prime 3.9-acre West End Summit property at the Broadway/West End split.

Palmer said he already has secured new hotel and residential development partners for the land at 1600 West End Ave., but declined to identify those companies. "There is significant activity on the site, but no further details will be provided until finalized," he said.

For more than a decade, Palmer has sought to develop the property with his current plans calling for 325 residential units and a four-star, 250-room hotel along with a roughly $160 million, 360,000-square-foot office building and parking garage. Water has been drained from the hole in the ground at West End Summit, raising prospects that construction activity could resume at some point.

Palmer's engagement of Michael McDonald and Kennedy Hicks with investment banking firm Eastdil Secured's Atlanta office comes as an executive of Rubenstein Partners confirmed that the office-focused real estate investment firm was no longer involved with West End Summit.

"Alex wanted to go in a different direction," said Stephen Evans, a regional director with Philadelphia-based Rubenstein, which at one time was in negotiations to be Palmer's equity partner in a project at West End Summit that was expected to include a residential component in addition to a hotel and offices.

McDonald of Eastdil confirmed Palmer's engagement of his firm to help him find partners and financing sources for a mixed-use project at West End Summit. "We're not selling the land," McDonald said, dismissing chatter in local real estate circles about Palmer's willingness to sell the property as long as he's retained as the developer.

The project that Palmer now plans is expected to include 325 residential units and a four-star, 250-room hotel. There's also a 360,000-square-foot office building and a parking garage, which are expected to cost roughly $160 million to build, McDonald said.

Palmer's setback with developing West End Summit included hospital chain HCA pulling out of an agreement two and a half years ago under which two business units would've anchored a pair of office towers on a portion of the site. HCA instead built a building at the Capitol View mixed-use development site in the North Gulch, which its cancer care arm Sarah Cannon and health care business solutions company Parallon will occupy in 50 days.

At one time, law firm Bass Berry & Sims also was a candidate for relocation to West End Summit. But the law firm chose to relocate its offices to The Pinnacle at Symphony Place skyscraper in the area south of Broadway.

Previously, Palmer also had commitments that fell through with developers to bring an InterContinental Hotel and several hundred luxury apartments to West End Summit as part of an overall $300 million development. Since then, Palmer said he has recruited new partners that he declined to identify.